PC Gaming

No, fuck that. Be mad at Valve for just assuming Nintendo would flip out, if Valve did literally nothing. Homebrew in general is not what Nintendo's bastard lawyers get after.

And anyone who's gonna chime in 'oh but they gotta' can save it. They do not. All of this is optional. We choose to do this, and we can just as easily choose something else. Anyone who thinks the status quo demands evil and actively enables that instead of calling for it to change is choosing to be an asshole. That includes performatively rolling your eyes when people point to a problem that keeps happening and say "this fucking sucks."

Ehhh I absolutely would blame Valve here. They don't have to endorse the project to turn their eyes and allow it to proceed.

Valve's main obligation here, as I see it (IANAL), is their trademark. With copyright, it's up to the rightsholder whether or not they want to prosecute things. With trademarks, they have an obligation to prosecute things they come across or else they might lose that trademark.

There was no pressure on Valve here, except for that trademark thing. Even then, with what they've said, they weren't looking to protect their trademark. They were just looking to avoid the minimal risk that Nintendo actually sued the developers of Portal 64, and Nintendo might include Valve in such a lawsuit. It's not like Portal 64 was being released on Valve's Steam platform, like the Dolphin emulator was.

Valve's lawyers are being excessively conservative and risk averse here. As a result, the community that Valve relies on is suffering harm. That makes these lawyers fucking assholes, in my view. They didn't have to do anything, they weren't prompted to do anything, they did it off their own back to show that they were doing something.

If Nintendo had shut them down, that would be a different thing. However, that would almost certainly only have been a cease and desist letter, sent to the developers, with no involvement with Valve. Valve's lawyers have completely jumped the gun here and done something that actually harms Valve's public image, for no tangible benefit.

Valve should sack these lawyers, they're cunts.